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Hashim Thaçi's troubled relations with the Special Court, today in the dock five years after he voted

Politiko 2020-11-05 21:07:16

Hashim Thaçi's troubled relations with the Special Court, today in

Hashim Thaçi on Thursday morning officially announced his resignation from the post of President of Kosovo.

In his short speech, Thaçi said that the indictment against him has been confirmed and will be brought before the Hague Tribunal regarding war crimes charges in Kosovo, as he promised in June this year, when the Office of the Special Prosecutor of Kosovo based in The Hague announced that it had filed a ten-count indictment in the Kosovo Specialized Chambers, accusing Thaci, former Kosovo Assembly Speaker Kadri Veseli, and others of a range of war crimes including murder, enforced disappearance, persecution and torture.

The announcement came as Thaci was on his way to Washington for a meeting aimed at resuming negotiations between Serbia and its former province. The meeting at the White House was canceled while Thaçi returned to Kosovo.

How the Special Court was set up

The court was set up to try wartime and post-war crimes suspected of being committed by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters from 1998 to 2000.

It was created under great pressure from the US and the EU, and from the beginning has been very unpopular among Kosovo Albanians who saw it as an attack on the justice of the KLA war.

Three weeks after Kosovo's deputies approved the creation of the Specialized Chambers, in August 2015 Thaçi declared as Foreign Minister that “There is no Kosovar, including me, who would stand idly by and allow the Special Court to equate the genocidal crimes of "Slobodan Milosevic, on behalf of the Serbian state, with the perhaps desperate actions of an individual from an oppressed community committed during or after the war."

Thaci initially called the initiative "totally democratic", but later warned that the court "can not be repealed and will not be repealed", but the initiative was not successful.

As DË writes, Thaçi himself was the one who in 2015 pressured the Kosovo deputies to approve the establishment of the Special, but observers in Kosovo believe that Thaçi remembered that there would be no investigation against him personally. 

Hashim Thaçi was the commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was disbanded in 1999. The indictment includes torture and persecution, among others, and amounts to about 100 murders. Thaçi himself has denied all accusations and says that they are an attempt to tarnish the Kosovo War for Freedom. 

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